Experiments in organisation and the implications for management

There have been a number of articles and blogs published recently discussing the implications for management and management structures in the internet age. Here are a couple of links that I've been following:

Do we still need managers from the HR Zone blog that talks about the potential implications for management of the announcement by Zappos, the US online retailer, to abolish its reporting hierarchy and job titles. In its place is a self-organising model called Holacracy. The rationale is that this will help the company to become more adaptive to change and improve employee engagement, as individuals take on more responsibility for their own work.

Haier and higher from The Economist describes the attempts to transform the world’s biggest appliance-maker into a nimble internet-age firm. The firm has organised itself into 2000 self-managed teams that include responsibilities for P&L and rewarding performance.

It's too early to say whether either of these approaches will work or how they will adapt. Of greater importance is what they are pointing towards in terms of the practice of management and, perhaps, a much more fundamental disruption of how we think about this notion.
 

Whilst modern management as both a theorectical study and as a practice is a 20th century phenomenom, in truth management practices have been present long before these things became codified in the way they are now, e.g the building of the pyramids, the exploitation of slaves, the deployment of armies have all required the organisation of labour to achieve a desired outcome.


So what might this mean for the future role of managers?

In my blog Do manager's matter - using data to make the case I highlighted the analysis done by Google as to what employees wanted from their managers. Somewhat surprisingly, to my mind at least, was how conventional the results were: a good coach, empowering, results orientated and so on.
 

My hunch is that what constitutes good management practice, whether viewed from traditional management theory or a manager's perspective or from an employee's simply reverts to the status quo. It also reinforces a number of taken-for-granteds about management: that good management is about applying a set of generalised attributes and a fallacious separation between the work of managers and employees. However plausible, the attributes are too neat; they do not describe the interactional work that's taking place minute by minute between, say, the manager and their employees. If we were to look at the work of management or leadership what we would discover would not be generalisable or concrete but ephemeral and in a constant state of flux.  
 

The moves by Zappos and Haier to experiment with how they organise work is interesting on a number of levels.
 

• First, they are bold attempts to break away from traditional approaches of organisation. The internet age is changing the ways in which we connect with each other so why not experiment with radical approaches to organisation too?
• Second, they appear to be placing much greater emphasis on co-operation to get things done and less on the artificial distinctions between people at different levels in a hierarchy. 
• Third, they are pointing towards something that Henry Mintzberg has been writing about for some years and that is the need for less leadership and more community-ship. Here is his quote from a piece in the FT in 2006:

 

Isn’t it time to think of our organisations as communities of cooperation, and in so doing put leadership in its place: not gone, but alongside other important social processes.

What should be gone is this magic bullet of the individual as the solution to the world’s problems. We are the solution to the world’s problems, you and me, all of us, working in concert. This obsession with leadership is the cause of many of the world’s problems.

And with this, let us get rid of the cult of leadership, striking at least one blow at our increasing obsession with individuality. Not to create a new cult around distributed leadership, but to recognize that the very use of the word leadership tilts thinking toward the individual and away from the community. We don’t only need better leadership, we also need less leadership.

  Mintzberg, H. (2006) 'Community-ship is the answer'. Business Education Supplement, Financial Times 23rd October 2006: 8

Conclusion

Whether what's happening at Zappos or Haier will work is not the point. Of more importance is what emerges from these experiments. As I have written about on many occasions before, what should be of interest to practitioners, management developers, coaches and so on is the study and understanding of the intricate workings of meaning making between people. These experiments, if studied, may help brush away the legacies of hierarchy and to look instead at how people are working together.

 

 

  

Learning and Skills Exhibition 2014

I went to the Learning and Skills Exhibition at Olympia this year.  It is a popular event that's co-located with the Learning Technologies Exhibition and Conference and both days were very busy.

The exhibition is free to enter and there were a large number of seminars running in parallel across 10 open theatre areas.  These were being run by commerical training providers and although this meant that they included a certain amount of 'selling', by and large, I found the content well presented and a good way of taking the pulse about what's going on in the L&D market.  It was also a great networking event.  I bumped into a lot of people both on the stands and as attendees and had some interesting chats with old and new contacts.

The things that I saw which interested me were...

Social learning using user-generated video

Fuse Universal and Phones4U gave a lively presentation about the use of user-generated video to help develop sales effectiveness.  The video link that I've added does a good job in making the case for this type of social learning.  What I can't find online is the video that was shown at the conference,  produced by one of Phones4U's frontline sales people.   It was creative, full of energy and contained lots of context-specific content with sales tips and tricks.   

Online Coaching Development

The University of Cambridge's Institute of Contunuing Education (ICE) presented their online approach to coach development.  The title of the presentation was 'Can you really learn coaching skills online?'

Given that this was a presentation about their online learning programme, then the answer was 'yes' of course.  What really interested me was the analysis from research done with students about their levels of discomfort with self-disclosure in discussions.  The continuum was from: working 1:1 with another person face-to-face (most comfortable) through working in trios, groups of up to 5, groups of 6 or more to online (least comfortable); the results were just over 70% for 1:1 to about 20% for online working.

What impressed me was that the presenter acknowledged the virtue of workshop-based coach development but also pointed towards an alternative approach using online methods.  The course uses Skype to create a 'bubble' for paired coach/coachee practice with the facilitator also present providing verbal feedback, through the Skype channel, to the trainee coach.    The rest of the learning group/set could listen to the conversation through headphones and were invisible to the coaching pair.  They were able to add their written feedback about the coaching practice. 

The point in all of this is that if you want to develop coaching skills and you can get along to a traditional workshop then this approach has a lot going for it.  But not everybody can work this way and the online model demonstrated a compellling alternative that replicated the 1:1 'safe space' for self-disclosure using Skype and also encouraged good deep learning processes from those observing through the written feedback process; an additional benefit being to the trainee coach of a permanent and reviewable record of the feedback for continuing reflection and learning.  

Ignite

Ignite is the name for a particular type of event that has been held in around 100 cities worldwide, organised by volunteers, at which participants speak about their ideas and personal or professional passions according to a specific format.  The tagline is '...enlighten us, but make it quick'.  Each speaker is allocated five minutes of presentation time and is accompanied by 20 presentation slides. During the presentations, each slide is displayed for 15 seconds and then automatically advanced.  To see examples follow these links Ignite Cardiff  Ignite Showreel

At the session I saw there were 6 speakers and the topics covered were: The best training event ever - NHS Couch to 5k programme, Skills@School, Life as a Digital Apprentice, Avoiding the Mariah Carey Syndrome, Being Your Best Self and The Baloney Detection Kit - Bertram Forer's Personality Test.

Reflections about format? Positives: lots of content in a short space of time, redundancy for the listener is minimised, encourages presenters to practice because the slides' advance is uncontrollable. Negatives - creates tension for the speaker  - I noticed that several of the presenters rushed and on many occasions were waiting for the next slide to advance; creates tension for the listener - I found myself paying a lot of attention to anticipating the next slide than necessarily concentrating on the speaker.

Overall, I thought that this was an interesting idea that has value as a learning process both for the presenter and the listener. 

   
     

Do managers matter? - using data to make the case

Over the past few months I've been commenting on leadership behaviours blog link and the qualities of effective managers blog link.  And so I read with interest the piece in the December 2013 edition of HBR 'How Google Sold Its Engineers on Management' by David A. Garvin. (Reprint R1312D)

What's interesting about this piece is not so much the conclusions reached about what Google's best managers do, but the ways in which these were validated by employee research.

Do managers matter?

In an organisation dedicated to being a company built by engineers for engineers, there was an instinctive belief that management might be more destructive than beneficial; a distraction from the real work of problem solving.  Indeed, so uncertain were they about the value of managers, they experimented with a completely flat organisation, eliminating engineering managers.  The experiment lasted only a few months when too many people were going to the CEO with questions about expense reports, interpersonal conflicts and other nitty-gritty issues.  And then there were the contributions that managers made to communicating company strategy and policy, prioritising resources, facilitating career development, etc.

What do good managers do?

Here's the list developed from studying, coding and processing qualitative comments from thousands of employee surveys, performance reviews and submissions for the organisaton's great manager award. 

1. Is a good coach
2. Empowers the team and does not micromanage
3. Expresses interest in and concern for team members' success and personal well-being
4. Is productive and results-oriented
5. Is a good communicator - listens and shares information
6. Helps with career development
7. Has a clear vision and strategy for the team
8. Has key technical skills that help him or her advsie the team

No surprises but the list resonated because it was based on Google data.  The behaviours emerged from what was already happening and working, bottom-up.  This contrasts starkly with the top-down approach on which I have commented previously. 

Things that I noticed...

Small incremental increases in manager quality were quite powerful

Through the application of statistical techniques, the researchers were able to show how even small differences in manager performance against the eight behaviours reduced employee turnover and improved retention as well as greater satisfaction in areas like innovation, work-life balance and career development.

A common language and agenda for improvement

The behaviours served three important functions:

1. A shared vocabulary for discussing management.  The behaviours primarily describe leaders of small and medium sized teams and are especially relevant to first and second level management.
2. Clear guidelines for how to improve it - through use of verbatim examples of best practices from the survey participants
3. Encapsulated the full range of management responsibilites; from strategy development to delivering results

Practice-based learning

Google has put in place practice-based training, e.g. 'hands-on' exercises based on the actual things that managers need to do, plus piloting online Google Hangout sessions so that managers from around the world can participate and panel discussions featuring high-scoring managers from each function.

Understanding management...going deeper into the data

Google has taken a very interesting step towards using data to understand what managers do and what effect differences in relative performance have on a range of employee measures, most of which are intangible. But, as the article admits, the causal relationships between employee satisfaction and the bottom-line are difficult to establish.

As I have written about on several previous occasions, management work remains understudied.  Even Google's approach here misses and glosses over the detail of the intricate interactional work that takes place second by second in the workplace.  Ethnographic methods that observe managers working would provide a rich source of new information, something that Google themselves recognise and the research team have started to do.  The work by Sociometric Solutions at MIT is showing how technology can help get at this data (featured in the April 2012 edition of HBR 'The New Science of Building Great Teams' pages 59-70).  And maybe what will eventually be possible are other tools that can show not only generalised behavioural characteristics but detailed interactional data maps - see my Mapping social settings blog for further observations about this.

What am I noticing?...about blogging

There are many reasons why people blog: demonstrating expertise, sharing knowledge, self-promotion, as an aid to learning and so on. 

I think these are some of the reasons why I blog too but there's also some other things that I notice about myself when engaging with the process of blogging.

The discipline of feeding the blog with copy

My self-imposed goal is that I will write something at least once a month.  The discipline to keep the blog alive is a powerful enabler for me, especially the closer I get to the end of the month.  The timeline gives a kind of structure to my learning that I might otherwise let slip.

  

What am I noticing?

To write something I must find something that's of interest to my practice.  I ask myself the question 'What am I noticing?' and 'What am I paying attention to?' in whatever I am doing.  What I notice is that there is always something, in these fragments of reflections, that sparks an idea.  I like the ways in which this makes my learning feel constantly renewed.

Walking the talk

I feel a strong sense of 'walking the talk' of personal responsibilty for learning, through my management development practice and blogging is one way in which I can show this.  I am encouraged to keep going when people tell me that they value what I am sharing.

 

A place for reflection

Like everybody else, my day-to-day life is full of interactions and it's not easy keeping track of or making sense of what it is I am learning. The permanent recording of my interests in the flow of time provides me with a place for reflection and something that I find really helpful.

Useful links

I've added below a few links about blogging which I hope are of some use.

Internal blogging is good for your career - 7 Ways Internal Blogging Can Help Your Career link 

How writing a blog can make you a better manager link

Are you a Sketchy Google Plusser?link

Note taking on steroids link

Blogs - creating shattering masterpieces or a foundation for creativity? link

How should your leaders behave ?

'How should leaders behave?' is the title of a brief article that appeared in HBR October 2013 (reprint F131OE).

Reading it I found myself feeling irritated by the nature of its prescriptions:

'We had to put the focus on the behaviours we expected leaders to display, and those had to be spelled out by the top team that was highly engaged, intellectually and emotionally, in the process.'

What's going on here that makes the writer so sure that this was the right approach and that some level of coercion was required to make the ideas stick.

The 'no alternative' problem

The article expresses a point of view that's commonly found in management development literature: that there is a tacitly stated ‘no alternative’ and that, as the article goes on to infer, adherence is mandatory.  This is backed up by a starkly stated comment:

'...we found ways to foster behaviours using evaluations, surveys, communications and highly visible actions by leaders - including occasional dismissal for consistent and significant violations'

Interesting.  This is the same organisation that was attempting to use behaviours to build, develop and lead empowered and diverse teams.  

What's being taken for granted?  

I have a concern with how the behavioural standards came into being, typical no doubt of how other organisations do this too.  I noticed that the author wanted to emphasise how the top team had been given the chance to explore and challenge the language used in the descriptors.  This privileged the top team and treated them as separate from others in the organisation who would also be expected to adopt the behaviours.  Taken at face value, this set up an approach that felt quite cult-like, almost like commandments from a higher authority.   This may or may not have been intentional, but the effect might have been to have reinforced the status quo of how things get done in that organisation rather than enabling it to respond to growth and change.

Management 'science'

Organisations use behavioural frameworks because I think they like the patina of objectivity which they offer in the tricky process of measuring and rewarding not just what gets done, but also how things get done.  But this is problematical because organisational life is dynamic.

I'm not against behavioural frameworks as such because I think they do provide some helpful clarifications of what's expected.  And behaviours are probably most useful as a means of calibration in those situations that require a snapshot of performance, e.g. for recruitment or talent spotting.  But in the day-to-day work of management my sense is that they are much less effective because, however well drafted and communicated, they are treated as being separate from, rather than integrated with, the work itself.    
 

Organisations and organisational life is full of paradoxes 

Organisations are awash with paradoxes and contradictions.   For managers and leaders, who are required to manage the performance of the organisation, this is especially complicated.  To illustrate, they must continually:

• divide up complex tasks to enable them to get done, but at the same time ensure that the outputs are integrated
• deliver results personally and collaborate to get things done
• maintain continuity and innovate
• create order and experiment
• plan and react
• control and empower  

And perhaps the most striking paradox in the HBR article is that leaders should display the prescribed behaviours and capitalise on individual styles.  This feels like a 'have your cake and eat it' problem.

It is how we relate with others that matters

The purpose in writing this blog is to explore the paradoxes in play and to think about what this might mean for management learning.  

For me, the heart of the matter is the need for each of us to pay close attention to how we interact with each other.  We might try to boil this down to a set of five to ten behaviours but if we approach it this way we deflect ourselves from paying close attention to what's really going on in any two-way process of communication.

What I'm pointing to is that there are diverse ways of relating to others, behaviours if you want to describe it this way, but these ways of relating will always be situational based on who's involved, the task and the cultural and societal norms of that organisation or group.   The fact is that we are human beings, not machines.  We come with our own unique styles and strengths and what's more important is that each person takes seriously the pros and cons of how they relate with other people rather than attempting to display behaviours annointed by others.  In my experience, the reward for doing so is better self awareness as to what works, more confidence in playing to strengths and, therefore, better quality relationships.       

Concluding thoughts

My sense is that the views expressed in the HBR article describe an approach that is neither desirable nor appropriate for today's business environment.  The greater complexity in organisations today means that we need people, regardless of their level of responsibility, who can think for themselves, who can act as part of a community and who have very good self awareness.  This is even more important for managers because of the influence that they have over others through their roles.  It follows that we need approaches to development that encourage a much greater sense of inquiry, openness and collaboration and much less that is directed and top-down. 

My work on the NODES model sets out an approach for development that pays attention to these ideas.  You can read more about them either in my blog or by going to my presentation on  SlideShare 

 





 

11 Qualities of the Effective Manager and their sources of learning

This model was developed by John Burgoyne and Roger Stuart at Lancaster University in the 1970s.  The write up of their research is buried in a long-since-forgotten paper published in 1976.  If you are interested in their research there is a chapter about the 11 qualities in the book A Managers Guide to Self Development.  This deals solely with the qualities and not the sources of management learning. It's their research on how managers have acquired the skills and other attributes, described in the model, which I have found of most interest.  I've summarised their findings here. 

Sources of Managerial Skill Development

Two methods were used to ascertain the sources of learning. Firstly, a critical incidents interview technique with 28 managers and secondly, using the data emerging from the interviews, via questionnaires distributed to over 100 managers from a variety of organisations.

In essence the question being asked was something like 'tell me about something that is critical to your role that you do well, and then describe how you have learnt to do this?'  

The nine sources

This produced nine learning sources, ranked here in order of importance

1. Doing the job - the tasks and skills of management picked up as they go along
2. Non-company education - graduate and post-graduate studies at universities and business schools
3. Living - the learning experience of life itself
4. In-company training - one-off seminars to structured programmes of management training
5. Self - derived from reflection, introspection and self assessment
6. Doing other jobs - the experiences gained from doing a diverse range of non-managerial jobs
7. Media - newspapers, books, professional journals, etc
8. Parents - derived from background and upbringing
9. Innate - skills and attributes considered to be genetically pre-determined   

Taken overall, the three most frequently mentioned sources were doing the job (42% of all mentions), non-company education (21%) and living (12%)

Which sources help develop which skills?

Slideshare

Since writing the original post in September 2013, I have produced a summary of the research and its implications as a Slideshare presentation.

11 qualities of the effective manager slideshare nov 2014 from John Rogers

 

 

Conclusion - what are the implications for management learning?

What strikes me as being most important about this research is that it's based on what managers are themselves saying.  Their answers tell us how they link critical qualities/skills and learning sources.

That a variety of experience matters: doing the job, doing other jobs and from the experience of life itself.

That structured learning experiences are helpful, especially when learners have the chance to engage with others outside of the organisation and to engage in deep learning practice and assessment.

What's notable, by its absence, is any reference to coaching and mentoring as sources of learning.  Given that it's a learning practice that has become widely used in organisations either with external coaches and mentors or with the development of line manager coaching skills, this absence is surprising.  The researchers made no comment about this and it's possible that as a management development practice it was less prevalent in the mid-70s.  Or perhaps that for the managers it was wrapped up in the natural processes of doing the job or living.

And maybe that's the key point: that managers get it that they learn most of what they can do by doing the job.  As learning specialists, my sense is that we can and should do more to help managers learn from their experience; through observation, by paying attention and thinking about what it is that they are already doing.  Observation and reflection then becomes the foundation for trying out new practices, getting feedback from peers and colleagues, developing a network inside and outside the organisation to share what it is that's working and what's not.  My NODES model provides a way of representing this as a flow of personal and collective learning.

Taking care of business means taking care of learning

Taking care of business means taking care of learning. If learning is everywhere, it should definitely be where the work is getting done. When learning is the work, we need to observe how people are learning to do their work already. We should find these natural pathways and reinforce them. 

 Quote from Harold Jarche's blog post Work is learning, learning is the work

I was talking recently to a senior manager about ways of supporting a business change programme that will be moving into business as usual.  It was clear that a lot of hard work had been done by the project team through regular communications and workshops to support the targeted group of people.  My critical perspective is that, in common with lots of similar initiatives, the change process has tended to focus too strongly on top-down communications and 'sheep dip' skills development. 

So what's the problem? 

When you are implementing change of one type or another, it's tempting to follow a route that reflects the established hierarchical order of the organisation.  I think this is the wrong way around.  If we really want change to happen is has to come from the inside-out, i.e. endogenously rather than from the outside-in, i.e. exongenously.  The former places responsibility for change with individuals; the latter takes it away and may even be de-skilling people, at least in terms of their own learning. 

What should we focus on? 

As Harold Jarche reminds us, taking care of business means taking care of learning.

My priorities for taking care of learning would be these:

Encourage balanced learning habits

The importance of learning skills is one of the more recent discoveries of research on managerial and leadership work.  Success can be explained by the presence or absence of habits and skills related to learning.  These habits and skills include being able to use a range of different learning processes from courses, coaching and reflection and to be capable of abstract as well as practical thinking.

Develop the skills of observation and analysis

Again research tells us that we learn most of what we know on the job.  Therefore, formal learning processes should focus much more on developing the skills of workplace observation and analysis.  The results of this approach would help people understand what and how they and/or their teams are already doing.  It would also produce a number of possible pathways for development.

Enable communities. Promote networks

In the 70:20:10 learning model, the 20% represents the learning from others.  Developing the means to be able to learn from people beyond one's immediate colleagues opens up opportunities for new perspectives and problem solving.  Examples include the use of portals and social networks like Yammer and Jive. 

Bundle resources

Organisations can do a lot to put together bundles of resources from which learners can draw.  Things like:

• Self-analysis questionnaires and quizzes
• Short, simple videos
• Mini-scenarios that allow the user to check whether they can put what they have learned into practice
• Decision aids 
• Reference material in PDF format

Conclusion

In my view, learning should encourage the sense of discovery and challenge.  It should be entrepreneurial in the sense that learners should be expected to take the initiative.  The technology around us right now is making this easy to achieve.  The agenda that I continue to pursue is to support and challenge organisations to think and act differently.

Further reading: A Manager's Guide to Self-Development by Mike Pedler, John Burgoyne, Tom Boydell 

Picture from Deposit Photos